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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 18 2017, @04:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the searching-for-bitcoin-in-all-the-right-places dept.

AMD's Vega 64 GPU is an underwhelming chip that competes against the GTX 1080, which is a 15 month old GPU. Nvidia could lower the price of the GTX 1080 and 1070 to better compete against Vega 64 and 56, or launch Volta-based consumer GPUs in the coming months. But Vega 64 is sold out everywhere due to cryptocurrency miners.

AMD has released an updated (Windows-only) driver called Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute. The driver improves the hash rate for Ethereum mining significantly, and Vega 56 performance may even exceed that of Vega 64 (it is a beta driver so these results are subject to change):

As you can see, we're getting some pretty significant gains already (at stock speeds) with this beta driver. We wouldn't be surprised if there are even further optimizations to be found, once AMD is ready to go with a production driver, but we'll take what we can get right now. We did have one performance anomaly that we ran into, however. When cranking up the memory speeds, the Vega 56 actually vaulted past the Vega 64, cranking out 36.48 MH/s. That's not bad for a card that's supposed to retail for $399.

Unfortunately, there is some confusion over the true price of Vega 64, although they are out of stock anyway aside from some hardware and game bundles.

Nvidia's market cap hit $100 billion on the day of the Vega 64 launch. Nvidia's CEO told investors that the company has the ability to "rock and roll" with the volatile cryptocurrency market (implying less shortages).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @04:56PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @04:56PM (#555973)

    way to be on the driver, seriously. but we will need the hardware too, unfortunately. pls figure out how to do the supply part of the equation so that you can take full advantage of this "craze".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:00PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:00PM (#555975)

    me again. i didn't notice that some dumb fuck decided it should be a windows driver. completely disgusting. please fire/slap that moronic whore.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:59PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:59PM (#556000)

      Me again, one more time:
      Oh wait, what was I thinking! DUH.
      Nobody cares what OS you are running since nobody is using the the card as a video card they just load a binary blob on it and use it for mining.

      It would be nice if AMD just released a card with multiple GPUs and make no pretense of selling a video card.... Oh, they did that already too?

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 18 2017, @07:24PM (2 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 18 2017, @07:24PM (#556046) Journal

        Would a multi-GPU Vega melt steel?

        Vega 64 used up to 150 W more power than the GTX 1080.

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        • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 18 2017, @11:50PM

          by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 18 2017, @11:50PM (#556185)

          Yeah, it seems like more hashes is only better if the hashes per watt stays about the same (or less).

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        • (Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Monday August 21 2017, @08:20PM

          by ncc74656 (4917) on Monday August 21 2017, @08:20PM (#557217) Homepage

          Vega 64 used up to 150 W more power than the GTX 1080.

          Ow. I'm getting ~30.5 MH/s each from two GTX 1070s which I've underclocked and power-limited to 115 W. A third GTX 1070 that'll go down to 95 W does about 29 MH/s. I don't know how much more power a GTX 1080 would draw, but if the Vega 64 is 150 W beyond that...?